Hinch: The future of religion? Look at O.C.

June 21, 2013

Updated 12:28 p.m.

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Changes at Crystal Cathedral -- soon to be known as Christ Cathedral -- symbolize some of the big-picture shifts that have taken place at churches, synagogues and mosques in Orange County over the past decade. Here, Monsignor Michael Heher, far right, takes members of St. Anne's Catholic Church on a tour of the cathedral, a property acquired last year by the Catholic Church. Remnants of the congregation that founded Crystal Cathedral will hold their last service in the building on June 30. ANA VENEGAS, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Members of Epic Church in Fullerton pray and take communion in front of a portable wooden cross. Epic Church, once primarily Asian, is one of many in Orange County reaching out to non-Asian members. PAUL BERSEBACH, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Changes at Crystal Cathedral -- soon to be known as Christ Cathedral -- symbolize some of the big-picture shifts that have taken place at churches, synagogues and mosques in Orange County over the past decade. Here, Monsignor Michael Heher, far right, takes members of St. Anne's Catholic Church on a tour of the cathedral, a property acquired last year by the Catholic Church. Remnants of the congregation that founded Crystal Cathedral will hold their last service in the building on June 30. ANA VENEGAS, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

The future of religious America lives in a two-story beige office building in downtown Fullerton, where homeless people and college graduates attend church together.

The future also lives at a mosque in Mission Viejo. At an organic farm started by a megachurch. In downtown Santa Ana, where kids of many faiths feed the homeless. And in an Orange County church for hipsters where women, once excluded from ministry, now are pastors.

The future of religious America is all over Orange County. And that future, like the county itself, is diverse, entrepreneurial, stratified by economic extremes, innovative and endlessly fascinating.

Or so it seems to me after a few months back on the religion beat.

Ten years ago I was a young reporter not far out of graduate school when I began covering religion for the Register. Many journalists shun religion coverage, maybe because they're squeamish about faith, or because they think it's boring.

Not me, and not in Orange County. I landed in the thick of the Catholic Church's sexual abuse crisis, a full-time job in itself.

But I also quickly realized that writing about religion was a wide-open door to writing about the richness of life itself. Faith engages people at the deepest level and motivates them to do extraordinary things – sometimes extraordinarily good, sometimes extraordinarily bad.

In 2003, every story I wrote seemed to portend some path-breaking trend emanating from Orange County.

That year, Saddleback Church pastor Rick Warren was just beginning to ride the wave of fame and influence that followed publication of his international best-seller, “The Purpose Driven Life.”

Orange County Muslims, still reeling from the cultural fallout of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, were tentatively reaching out to other faiths.

A new generation of young Asian American Christians was founding churches that aimed their reach beyond an immigrant audience.

And Catholics were struggling to move beyond the abuse issue, even as a rapid influx of immigrant faithful pointed toward future demographic dominance.

I reveled in all of this. But then Arnold Schwarzenegger was unexpectedly elected governor of California, and the Register, then expanding its state capital bureau, sent me to Sacramento to cover Gov. Terminator.

Here's what I learned: Covering politics is repetitive, dispiriting and reflexively combative. It's a wide- open door to the meanness of life.

Thankfully, in Sacramento I met Kate, now my wife, and a year and a half later we moved to New York City, where Kate got a job at an Episcopal church in Manhattan and I got a job as an editor at a religious features magazine called Guideposts.

We moved back to California two years ago when Kate got a job as leader of her own congregation. Last year, I resumed writing for the Register.

What a difference a decade makes.

All of those trends I witnessed sprouting in Orange County 10 years ago have taken root. And they've spawned even more trends that continue to place Orange County at the forefront of religious life in America.

Epic Church, the downtown Fullerton congregation where the homeless and college graduates worship side by side, 10 years ago was a fledgling gathering of young Asian Americans searching for a new way to do ethnic ministry.

Today, the church is one of numerous Orange County congregations leading an even newer wave: once primarily Asian churches that now attract worshippers of all ethnicities eager for urban diversity and engagement with the inner city.

“We really felt a call to our city,” Kevin Doi, Epic's founding pastor, told me earlier this year. “I think that transformed how we thought about our church and the kind of people who came to our church.”

Epic's roughly 200 members regularly welcome worshippers from a nearby homeless shelter and mentor low-income high school students in the nearby Garnet neighborhood.

The church's small size, multiethnic congregation – slightly more than half Asian, the rest white, black and Hispanic – and inner-city location are characteristics on the rise in churches across America.

After decades of dominance, the suburban megachurch – another trend pioneered in Orange County – is losing ground with a younger generation of Christians who favor smaller, more urban ministries like Epic's.

That surprised me. So did news that evangelical Protestantism, the backbone of American Christianity that spawned all those megachurches, is itself on the decline.

Less than 10 years after evangelicals reached an apogee of influence by powering the re-election of President George W. Bush in 2004, large evangelical denominations such as the Southern Baptists are losing members.

Young people, according to pollsters, are turning away from large church institutions and conservative stances on social issues, especially homosexuality.

Here again Orange County leads. Local evangelical congregations were among the first in the nation to reach out to AIDS victims, embark on large-scale social-justice ministries and, in some cases, lose members after reorienting away from rapid growth toward core Christian values of service and community.

More recently, Orange County churches have adapted to changing tastes by starting an organic farm (as Saddleback Church did at its Rancho Capistrano campus) and promoting women into ordained leadership.

At Rock Harbor Church in Costa Mesa, a megachurch attended by a mostly college-age crowd, women are employed as pastors and preach on Sundays.

When Orange County churches do get involved in politics these days, it's to advocate for immigration reform, not a ban on same-sex marriage. A coalition of local churches was instrumental in formation of the Evangelical Immigration Table, a national coalition backing a proposed overhaul of America's immigration laws.

That focus on immigration is no accident. The two most energized religious communities in Orange County today are Catholics and Muslims, both faiths powered by an influx of immigrants.

Muslims, led by charismatic imams such as Sheikh Yassir Fazaga at the Orange County Islamic Foundation in Mission Viejo, are forging ties with other faiths, starting schools, opening bookstores and hosting kids' summer camps.

A Muslim mom from Irvine now regularly brings an interfaith group of children to downtown Santa Ana to feed the homeless. The kids learn about each other's faiths and tour churches, mosques and Hindu temples.

Hussam Ayloush, head of the Orange County office of the Council on American Islamic Relations, a national advocacy group, led a recent push to elect local Muslims as delegates to the California Democratic Party.

“Muslims are all over L.A. and Orange County,” Rohnda Ammouri, an Anaheim political consultant, told me recently. “I feel that sense of community I've never felt before.”

The most striking demonstration of immigrants' rise to religious prominence in the county will take place next month, when a large, multilingual Catholic parish conducts its first worship service on the grounds of the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove.

The cathedral, built in 1980 by the Rev. Robert H. Schuller, was sold to Orange County's Catholic diocese in 2011 for $58 million after Schuller's ministry declared bankruptcy.

Kevin Vann, the recently installed bishop of Orange, will hold the first Catholic Mass on the grounds outside the cathedral on June 29. A day later, Schuller's remnant congregation will hold its last service at the cathedral. After that, the cathedral will shut its doors for a two-year, $50 million renovation into a Catholic worship center and civic showplace.

The parish church of St. Callistus, currently celebrating 29 Masses each week in English, Spanish and Vietnamese at a church in Garden Grove, will move to the cathedral, with worship services in an older church building on the campus until the cathedral reopens in 2015.

The symbolism couldn't be starker. Schuller's ministry began in a drive-in movie theater in 1955, when Orange County was a newly suburbanizing outpost of greater Los Angeles.

Now the county is its own dizzyingly diverse urban-suburban hybrid that continues to point toward the future precisely because of all those new arrivals from beyond the county's borders.

That's one thing that's remained the same over the past decade. Orange County still fascinates me because of its unique blend of past and future, middle America and Pacific Rim.

Other places I've lived – Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York – are cultural outliers in America, looked to by others but not reflective of how most Americans live.

Orange County has it all: New immigrants and old-timers from the Midwest; surf rats and tech nerds; the super poor and the super rich. It's like America, only a few steps ahead.

That's especially true on the religion beat. I couldn't be happier covering Orange County's rich spiritual mosaic. I can't wait to find out what happens next.

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